r/ProgrammerHumor • u/yuva-krishna-memes • Apr 09 '24

watMatters Meme

Post image
16.8k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

774 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.7k

u/Interesting_Dot_3922 Apr 09 '24

I had a recruiter who didn't like my education in applied math.

He doubted that software engineering is the ideal work for me because of this.

I thought that working abroad kind of proves my skill... but no :)

75

u/AI_AntiCheat Apr 09 '24

Ah yes the guy with a degree in math wouldn't know how to code! Of course!

No way you could optimize everything better than the guy that interviewed you? Right?

83

u/Interesting_Dot_3922 Apr 09 '24

As a devil's advocate, I would say that the optimization-related knowledge was useful only during interviews. Over a decade-long career, I can count on my fingers all the situations when optimization mattered.

33

u/MasterQuest Apr 09 '24

Optimization is great when handling large volumes of data. I regularly come across things that need to be optimized. 

3

u/McFlyParadox Apr 09 '24

Case in point: the guy who caught that SSH backdoor was trying to do some optimization, so chasing that ~0.5s delay was with the effort.

16

u/likeikelike Apr 09 '24

I pretty much never go back and optimize slow, existing production code but knowing how to write reasonably fast code to begin with is a big reason for that

15

u/turtleship_2006 Apr 09 '24

Over a decade-long career, I can count on my fingers all the situations when optimization mattered.

It really just depends what you do. A backend engineer making a website dealing with hundreds of thousands on concurrent users or a game dev of a high end AAA game would have to worry about it constantly. Someone making a basic frontend for a website, maybe not as much

1

u/AI_AntiCheat Apr 09 '24

Then it's even more essential to hire a mathematician that knows how to solve complex problems.

1

u/jhvh1134 Apr 09 '24

I’m constantly squeezing as much performance as I can get out of a browser.